I’m cold inside, but my bed offers the illusion of warmth. It will not infuse my bones and my blood will remain reptilian: Jack Frost has not simply nipped at my nose. His touch has violated me, it has burrowed through my flesh and pulsed through my veins until I myself have become Ice.

On the days that I cannot get out of bed, food feels like a nemesis that my teeth are in no position to battle, my tongue too weary from words unsaid to even pretend. And so, in liquid states I ingest only -and barely -what I need to keep me alive… But I always wonder: what I am trying to stay alive for, anyway?

On the days that I cannot get out of bed, my closet remains untouched as each clean garment lays folded precisely in place -and I? I bask in the putrid glory of pyjamas that cling to my skin in a disgusting display of three-day-old sweat, their sleeves crusted with snot and my chest stained with the remnants of a meal that did not quite make it to my mouth.

On the days that I cannot get out of bed, my mouth seals itself in a strike of silence and I wonder if anyone knows how grateful they ought to be? For I haven’t cleansed myself in as long as I haven’t felt like myself. My unwashed hair glistens as though it could provide a fast food restaurant with enough grease to operate the entire franchise, and my eyes are gummed with what the Sandman is working overtime to deliver -gifts that bring only nightmares, never dreams.

On the days that I cannot get out of bed, I wonder what it would feel like not to ever have to get up again? The blankets swathe me in their surety of safety from any external hardships, yet nothing can undo the pounding pessimism that wraps itself around my own internal being -strangling all that makes me who I am. I wonder if the inside of my coffin will be the comfortable haven my bed is not? I wonder how soon I will get there…

Lately my body has begun to fail me. It has derailed with my mind in a pitiful downward spiral that is the ever – present battle of Manic Depression -and today, I am more Depressed than Manic.
And so on this day, I cannot get out of bed.